In two different interviews today--one with ABC's Diane Sawyer, and another with TPM's Greg Sargent--Hillary Clinton loyalist James Carville undercut a key rationale for Clinton staying in the race. According to Carville, Barack Obama will beat John McCain in the fall contest. True, he thinks that Hillary would win by a greater margin, but he believes that the Illinois Senator would as well:

Asked if he thought Obama would beat McCain, Carville said, "I think he will. I think Democrats will win in November... There's a crushing desire for change in this country. No one has seen a party or brand held in such low esteem" than the Republicans.

Earlier in the day, Carville was still spinning the assassination remarks, accusing the Obama camp of trying to benefit from Clinton's gaffe. But even then, he veered off-message and asserted that Obama would beat McCain in the general election. Watch:



All the self -righteous posturing aside, superdelegates within listening or reading range of these two interviews must have been struck at the divergent signals coming from Carville, who told Sargent that Obama's weakness among whites who haven't gone to college was overrated:

"I would argue that if he [Obama] gets what Kerry got he will still win the election, because the dynamics have changed."

Those dynamics? Among others, a huge surge of young people and African Americans turning out to vote.

Patrick J. Buchanan, MSNBC's Senior Political Analyst, author and all-around "save the white race from annihilation and extinction" advocate comes closer and closer to losing it completely.

Buchanan, whom I had profiled in some detail here, has turned into the white man's foil during this primary season on MSNBC. Always quick to point out the problems with Obama's capture of the lunch bucket crowd and how he can't get out the white vote, Buchanan has warmed to Senator Clinton for becoming the "everyman" that he feels is necessary to capture the race for the Dems. The more Obama wins, the more agitated Buchanan becomes.

I'll set up the video below as I had seen the whole thing live and this clip, while great, does not capture what set Pat off.

This immediately followed John Edwards' endorsement of Obama last night. The subject of conversation with Pat, Matthews and Andrea Mitchell was if anyone thought that Edwards would help Obama capture the working-class white vote. The exit polling on race as a basis for voting in WV was astounding. When asked if race was an important factor for their candidate of choice, Clinton voters answered 85% that race was an important factor - far higher than any primary before.

The Obama campaign doesn't talk about it much, but will admit when pressed that they started this process knowing that there was a small, but not insignificant, segment of the population that just will not vote for an African-American.

Running just below the surface in the campaign and in the media, is the undercurrent of racism still to be found in pockets around the country - rural, urban and suburban. While Senator Obama's message is inclusive and pan-racial, the workers on the ground have felt the sting that the campaign itself does not wish to highlight and the media has mostly ignored.

The Washington Post today has some harsh stories of field workers, phone bankers and surrogates having doors slammed in their faces, being called the most derogatory of racial terms and physically threatened.

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"

Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across "a lot of racism" when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."

The Associated Press is reporting that, according to an AP/Yahoo! Poll, Barack Obama's support among white non-college graduates has fallen sharply over the course of this campaign:

In an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll in April, 53 percent of whites who have not completed college viewed Obama unfavorably, up a dozen percentage points from November. During that period, the numbers (of yahoos) viewing Clinton and Republican candidate John McCain negatively have stayed about even.

Pennsylvania also illustrated the problems racial attitudes among less educated whites are causing Obama.

In exit polls, one in five of the state's white voters who haven't completed college said race was an important factor in choosing a candidate, about double the number of white college graduates who said so.

Apparently, at press time, no polling data was available on the all important "bag of rocks" demographic.

The article goes on to cite concerns among uneducated whites that Senator Obama doesn't address their concerns specifically enough. So the problem is they want to see more policy papers? What's going on here?

That super-spooky, evil-genius, Lord-of-the-Sith GOP-mastermind Karl Rove, so despised and feared on the left, has again offered his unsolicited insights on the present condition of the Democratic primary. And, once again, Rove makes clear why the left so hates and loathes him - he is dead on in his analysis.

Rove begins... well, where Rove begins: Voter demographics. Despite outspending Clinton 3-1 and enjoying a 4%-5% lead in the days just prior to the election, Obama lost by 10% and failed to seal-the-deal with critical white, suburban votes.

The looming potential for disaster should have Democrats wringing their hands in fret. " Mr. Obama is near victory in the Democratic contest," Rove notes. However, Obama's"conduct in the last several weeks raises questions about whether, for all his talents, he is ready to be president."

Rove's perceptions on Obama's descent are enlightening.

And what of the reborn Adlai Stevenson? Mr. Obama is befuddled and angry about the national reaction to what are clearly accepted, even commonplace truths in San Francisco and Hyde Park. . . . Mr. Obama has a weakness among blue-collar working class voters for a reason.

His inspiring rhetoric is a potent tool for energizing college students and previously uninvolved African-American voters. But his appeals are based on two aspirational pledges he is increasingly less credible in making.

Mr. Obama's call for postpartisanship looks unconvincing, when he is unable to point to a single important instance in his Senate career when he demonstrated bipartisanship. And his repeated calls to remember Dr. Martin Luther King's "fierce urgency of now" in tackling big issues falls flat as voters discover that he has not provided leadership on any major legislative battle.

Naturally, there must be an inquiry into the motivation of such a contribution to the intellectual debate surrounding the Democratic contest from the dark overlord of the vast-right-wing-conspiracy. If Rove has an ulterior motive, it may be simply to articulate, via obvious perceptions and clear reasoning, the newly emergent truths: "The Democratic Party has two weakened candidates," and Obama may not be "ready for prime-time."

Judging from the title, you may think this is another post about Obama's small-town comments, but it's not. As it happens, the excellent political analyst Jay Cost has taken a deep look at the Ohio numbers and has offered a thesis for why it is that the Democrat superdelegates have not already swung over to Obama. In short, they're worried about Obama's performance among the swing voters.

Rather, the concern for Democrats is whether Obama's poor performance among white, strongly partisan Democrats is a sign he will be weak among white, persuadable voters. We're talking about weak partisans and Independents. They're the ones who swing elections in Ohio. Obviously, they differ from strong Democrats in terms of partisanship - but they still have many socioeconomic characteristics in common with them. The weak partisans and Indies are the relatives, friends, neighbors and coworkers of the strong Democrats who voted so overwhelmingly for Clinton last month. While the persuadables do not share their strong partisan orientation, they might share the same disinclination to Obama. The strong partisans expressed it in March by voting for Clinton; the weak partisans and Independents might express it in November by voting for McCain.

He'll have plenty of chances - what with Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia all coming up. There are lots of these types of voters for him to win over, and thus lots of chances to show that the Buckeye State was an outlier, that it just takes him longer to catch on with these folks.

This is why his comments in San Francisco were so unfortunate. If they are going to turn off anybody, it's the people we've been discussing. Obama really has to do just one thing in Pennsylvania. He doesn't need to win. He just needs not to get blown out among downscale whites like he did in Ohio. His comments - delivered at a time when about 12% of the Pennsylvania electorate is making up its mind - impede this task. Consequently, they may ultimately serve to extend the length of this primary battle.

There is a lot of interesting details in this latest Pew poll, but one of the most fascinating is that there are many Democrats who are likely to go for McCain if Obama is the nominee:

Although attention has been focused on McCain's problems with the GOP base, there are indications that some Democrats might defect if Obama is the party's nominee. Overall, 20% of white Democratic voters say they would vote for McCain if Obama is the Democratic nominee. That is twice the percentage of white Democrats who say they would support McCain in a Clinton-McCain matchup. Older Democrats (ages 65 and older), lower-income and less educated Democrats also would support McCain at higher levels if Obama rather than Clinton is the party's nominee.

Republicans shouldn't start rooting for Obama quite yet. Another factor revealed by this poll is that Obama makes up that weaknesses with more strength among independents. It's also a certainty that some of those Democrats would come back to the fold as the election nears.